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NAME

       insighttoolkit - imaging toolkit for segmentation and registration

DESCRIPTION

       This manual page briefly documents the Insight Toolkit (ITK).

       ITK  is an open-source software toolkit for performing registration and
       segmentation.   Segmentation  is  the  process   of   identifying   and
       classifying data found in a digitally sampled representation. Typically
       the sampled representation is  an  image  acquired  from  such  medical
       instrumentation  as  CT  or  MRI scanners.  Registration is the task of
       aligning or developing correspondences between data.  For  example,  in
       the  medical  environment,  a CT scan may be aligned with a MRI scan in
       order to combine the information contained in both.

       ITK is implemented in C++. In addition, an automated  wrapping  process
       generates  interfaces between C++ and interpreted programming languages
       such as Tcl, Java,  and  Python.  This  enables  developers  to  create
       software   using   a   variety  of  programming  languages.  ITK’s  C++
       implementation style is referred to as generic  programming.  Such  C++
       templating  means  that the code is highly efficient, and that the many
       software problems are discovered at compile-time, rather than  at  run-
       time during program execution.

       Because ITK is an open-source project, developers from around the world
       can use, debug, maintain, and extend the software. ITK uses a model  of
       software  development  referred  to  as  Extreme  Programming.  Extreme
       Programming collapses the usual software creation  methodology  into  a
       simultaneous  and  iterative  process of design-implement-test-release.
       The key features of Extreme Programming are communication and  testing.
       Communication  among  the  members  of  the ITK community is what helps
       manage the rapid evolution of the software. Testing is what  keeps  the
       software  stable. In ITK, an extensive testing process is in place that
       measures the quality on a daily basis.

HISTORY

       In     1999     the     US     National     Library     of     Medicine
       [http://www.nlm.nih.gov/nlmhome.html]  of  the  National  Institutes of
       Health  awarded  a  three-year  contract  to  develop  an   open-source
       registration  and  segmentation  toolkit,  which  eventually came to be
       known as the Insight Toolkit (ITK). The primary purpose of the  project
       is       to       support      the      Visible      Human      Project
       [http://www.nlm.nih.gov/research/visible/visible_human.html]         by
       providing  software  tools  to  process and work with the project data.
       ITK’s NLM Project Manager was Dr. Terry Yoo, who  coordinated  the  six
       prime  contractors who made up the Insight consortium. These consortium
       members included  the  three  commercial  partners  GE  Corporate  R&D,
       Kitware,  Inc.,  and MathSoft (the company name is now Insightful); and
       the  three  academic  partners  University  of  North  Carolina  (UNC),
       University  of  Tennessee (UT), and University of Pennsylvania (UPenn).
       The Principle Investigators for these partners were, respectively, Bill
       Lorensen  at  GE  CRD,  Will  Schroeder  at  Kitware, Vikram Chalana at
       Insightful, Stephen Aylward with Luis Ibanez at UNC  (Luis  is  now  at
       Kitware),  Ross  Whitaker with Josh Cates at UT (both now at Utah), and
       Dimitri Metaxas at UPenn. In addition, several  subcontractors  rounded
       out the consortium including Peter Raitu at Brigham & Women’s Hospital,
       Celina Imielinska and Pat Molholt at Columbia University,  Jim  Gee  at
       UPenn’s Grasp Lab, and George Stetton at University of Pittsburgh.

LICENSE

       ITK     is     released     under    a    BSD-style    license.     See
       /usr/share/doc/libinsighttoolkitX.Y/copyright for the full text.

API REFERENCE

       The API documentation is available in HTML generated by Doxygen, in the
       insighttoolkit-doc package.

MAILING LIST

       Join  the  community  by  subscribing  to  the  ITK  mailing  lists  at
       http://www.itk.org/HTML/MailingLists.htm.

AUTHORS

       The Insight Segmentation and Registration Toolkit is developed  by  the
       Insight Software Consortium and the ITK community.

SEE ALSO

       See the project homepage http://www.itk.org/ for more information.

                                 Oct 11, 2005